


Other Peoples' Stories

by Mithen



Category: Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Genre: Flashback, Gen, Introspection, Retrospective, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-20
Updated: 2012-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-31 11:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scenes from the life of Irulan Corrino:  daughter of an Emperor, wife of an Emperor, historian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other Peoples' Stories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vennefic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vennefic/gifts).



_ Daughter of one Emperor, married to another: my father's wife knew the power of words and dedicated her life to telling other peoples' stories. How I pitied her.  
\--Sayings of Ghanima Atreides, collected by Harq al-Ada _

Princess Irulan Corrino was twelve years old when she first learned the meaning of power. 

"I don't see why we must study this," Wensicia grumbled, her golden head bent over a political philosophy text. She and her sisters had been studying political philosophy with their Mentat tutor, preparing for a state dinner with their father. After these classes would be dancing lessons (which Wensicia much preferred), then table manners, to polish up on the formal intricacies of a Landsraad gathering. From twelve-year-old Irulan down to little Rugi, barely out of her toddler skirts, all must be poised and ready. 

"Your royal father wishes you to adorn his table with more than your beauty, my lady," said their Mentat tutor. "It is vital that a princess of the Corrino family be able to converse with agility and intelligence on all subjects."

Chalice, the second daughter of Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, was concentrating intently on her book, her brow furrowed with her patent desire to please their father. Irulan watched her lips moving slightly as she puzzled out a difficult passage. "I hear Father has been reading the teachings of Zonepi," Irulan whispered to her when the tutor was busy with Josifa and Rugi. "Maybe you should focus on him."

Her sister's face lit up and she skimmed through the book until she found the section on Zonepi, bending to it with fierce intensity. That night, she and Irulan stayed up late, memorizing key passages from Zonepi's _Analects_ and preparing witty conversation about him. When the night of the Landsraad banquet came, both Chalice and Irulan were ready.

The Emperor was talking with the lord of House Taligari about a recently collected set of Zensufi aphorisms, discussing the political and mystical implications of the sayings. Chalice shot Irulan a conspiratorial, charged look; when there was a pause in the conversation she leaned forward and said to Lord Taligari, her voice pitched to carry: "Is it not as Zonepi says: 'The mind is the web and also the spider, with the truth as the prey?'"

Taligari looked surprised but impressed. However, beside him, the Padishah Emperor's face darkened. "Zonepi!" he barked, his voice like a whip. "That charletan? His latest memoirs are nothing but a pack of lies and self-promotion. Zonepi," he snorted. "I see I must tell your tutor not to let you near his work if you can be taken in by his half-truths."

He turned back to Taligari, leaving Chalice with her mouth open, her face scarlet as if he had struck her. "But--" she gasped, "But I--"

She looked at Irulan in dismay. Irulan smiled, and the red spots on her sister's cheeks turned a deeper, mottled hue.

 _"You,"_ she breathed. And then she burst into tears, pushing her chair away from the table and running from the hall. 

Irulan smiled and and shrugged when her father gave her a questioning look. "My dear sister finds it hard to master her emotions at times," she said. "Wasn't it Elder Nool who said once that the emotions are like silt that muddies pure water, and that the important thing is to be still and let them settle before one acts?"

Her father beamed at her, reaching out to cup her cheek. "Such a clear mind! You are truly Corrino, my dear." Everyone at the table looked at her with admiration, and Irulan barely managed to keep a flush of triumph from marring her pale composure.

And so the girl Irulan learned the power of words.

**: : :**

"Your mother would be terribly disappointed," said Margot Fenring, her lush lips pursed in disapproval. She had summoned Irulan to her dressing-room, and Irulan had obeyed the wife of the Padishah Emperor's best friend.

Hasimir Fenring was there as well, sitting in front of the fireplace and reading a book, although Irulan knew his close-set little eyes missed nothing. She stood before Lady Margot, her hands clasped in front of her in the traditional pose of submission taught by the Bene Gesserit, but her thoughts were anything but submissive.

"I gave them four years of my life, dear Aunt," she murmured. "It became clear it was not a good match."

"It became clear you had no intention of committing to the Order," snapped Margot, her voice like a whip-crack across Irulan's face. "You take too many short cuts, refuse to stretch yourself."

Irulan felt anger heating her cheeks, took a deep breath and banished it. What did she care what this woman thought of her? This woman, this witch with her divided loyalties. Irulan was undivided, she was Corrino. She risked a glance at the ugly little man sitting warm by the fire, her father's closest confidant. _Divided loyalties_ , she thought, seeing on his clever secretive face the fingerprints of the Order, feeling an almost premonitory shiver down her back. _When the time comes, which will you be true to?_ His eyes met hers for an instant, assessing, and she looked away.

"Forgive me," she murmured, her eyes on the vermilion marble floor.

"Your father will be disappointed as well," Lady Margot said.

"He has already said so," Irulan said, careful to keep all satisfaction from her voice. He had said so indeed, his voice regretful. But Irulan's training had heard beneath his disappointment the deeper truth, that he had not wanted to lose her to the Bene Gesserit, any more than she had wanted to be lost. 

"We shall send another of your sisters," he had said. "Perhaps it is for the best. I have missed your council."

She had smiled to herself; she was smiling now, she realized. She had asked her father for a specific job, and he had granted it, and all the disapproving looks from Lady Margot and all the opaque glances from her timid-looking, deadly husband meant nothing to Irulan now.

She was to compile and write a history of House Corrino. 

**: : :**

"--What did you say, Ghani?"

Irulan broke off her story and smoothed back the hair from little Ghanima's face, pale and grave against the dark spice-cloth pillows. As always, Irulan looked for traces of Paul's face in her features, but found only fleeting glimpses: a way of looking from lowered eyelids, a certain angle of cheekbone. Mostly, Ghanima looked like her mother, Irulan's rival, Paul's beloved. _And yet I would throw myself before a hunter-seeker for her, child of my heart if not my body,_ thought Irulan, and believed it with all her soul.

"It's nothing," said Ghanima, "Just..." She hesitated, then blurted out, "Just that it didn't happen that way."

Irulan frowned, a chill whispering down her spine. She had been telling a story from the book she was working on, _A Child's History of Maud'Dib,_ recounting a tale of Paul's childhood when he had rescued Duncan Idaho from a Caladan sea-snake.

"My father didn't kill the snake in one stroke," said Ghanima, her deep azure gaze turned inward, reflecting. "And he was quite sick after." A small, wry smile, far too adult for her round child's face.

Irulan hoped her shudder didn't show in her expression. _Abomination!_ whispered her Bene Gesserit training. 

_No!_ she answered it, her nails cutting into the palm of her hand. _Not my little girl, not Paul's little girl!_

"Well, Ghani," she said placidly, kissing her on the brow. "Stories are better when the heroes are heroic, after all. Sometimes we make stories better when we tell them."

"I'm not certain my father was a hero." Ghanima's voice was thoughtful, musing. Then she seemed to take in the expression on Irulan's face, and she smiled. "But you're right about the stories, of course, Aunt Irulan." A tiny hand patted her arm reassuringly. "I'm sure your next book will be wonderful." She nestled down into the pillow, all her attention on Irulan again. "Will you tell me another, please?"

**: : :**

It was an open secret that Alia had taken another lover. Irulan watched her lingering over breakfast--sleek, smug, replete--and tried to hide the complicated welter of reactions the young woman always awoke in her.

"Ahhh, sister in law," sighed Alia, dipping her finger in a dollop of cream and licking it clean, apparently unaware of how lascivious it looked, "You must try this."

She cast Irulan a sidelong glance from her spice-blue eyes, and Irulan managed a weak smile. She knew what Alia called her behind her back: _the imperial scribbler, the eternal virgin bride!_ They had never been close, but lately Alia's attitude had become even more sardonic and caustic. Irulan knew what the Bene Gesserit dispatches whispered about the Regent, but she refused to believe it. It was too grotesque to consider. _To be possessed, to have your flesh invaded, your body not your own. To_ invite _such a thing, the most impossible of all._ No, surely St. Alia-of-the-Knife, the fierce, free girl Irulan had known--had, in her secret heart, envied--would never allow that.

"Did you sleep well, sister?" Alia's voice was all consideration, her eyes sparkling with mischief. "The nights can be so cold when one is alone."

_The marble maiden, untouched and unloved!_

"I was up late working," Irulan managed in the face of Alia's mockery. "I never feel the cold when I'm writing." She finished her drink and rose, all dignity. "Good morning to you, sister."

She felt Alia's cold eyes on her back as she left, Alia's smile like a damp hand on the back of her neck.

 _Oh Paul, I would never have betrayed you so. If only you had loved me!_

**: : :**

Deep into the night, Princess Irulan is working. She is writing, weaving a skein of words, a web to trap the fleeting figment of Paul Atreides, Maud'Dib, the Kwisatz Haderach, the Emperor. Her husband. Gone into the desert, lost in the cursed eternal sand of damned Arrakis. She writes, and she writes, the truth receding from her pen as she chases it. Writing other peoples' stories.

Late in the night, she sets aside her histories and writes other stories: stories where Paul loved her, where she reigned as Empress at his side, where she gave birth to beautiful strong children and all envied her.

Then she tears those up, as she always does.

Sometimes--not often--she writes other stories. Stories where she was something other than a pawn, something other than a bargaining chip. Stories where she shaped her own destiny.

They always start in the middle, and they never have an end. Where could such a tale start? How far back would she have to unravel her life, to find the point where it could be her own? And where could such a story ever go? There is only a blankness like the endless sand there.

She tears these stories up too, and returns to her histories, weaving words, imposing order onto chaos. She shapes the universe in retrospect and gives it meaning.

It is power enough, most of the time.


End file.
